6;; THE. :\ .:.> " . ii m ;. .... J-.:: tl. :: . __ !" EEl' .. --, THE. TALK THE. Notes and Comment T HE general murkiness of Broadway was pierced with brilliant spots of color the other morning, and Into our ken swam the monkey-caps of the Shrlners. These were the first of the season, we re- flected. To our sensitive eye, this sight is always as full of promise as the annual northward migration of wild geese, when they come honking along overhead in a V. The Shriners are late this year: looks like a cold summer. S OMEWHAT wistfully, perhaps, three or four restaurateurs in the Forties have placed tables and chairs on the sidewalk in front of their es- tablishments. We note this, and take it to be a shy emulation of Paris side- walk cafes. Our opinion is that it won't work very well. For one thing, there is no wine; and to sip English (. breakfast tea under a Forty-ninth Street sky at high noon is a little sticky. For another thing, there is no leisure in this town; to be seen dawd- ling with a chocolate éclair openly on the street would be a confession that you had failed in business. Final- ly, without the balmy stupor induced by wine and leisure, who can endure, for the course of a meal, the exhaust gases from traffic? We hope the sidewalk cafés survive and multiply, but it seems like a forlorn little hope. I T took the Columbia crew victory, the first in thirteen years, to wake OF us up to the fact that New York is not very collegiate. The unexpected feat would have stood any other col- lege town on its head. Yet all that evening following the race we were here and there about town, and failed to see a single instance of one citizen slapping another citizen on the back. The fact is, we did not learn who won till next morning. W INNER of our special Pulitzer anticlimax prize is the gentle- man who recently laid the cornerstone for the new building which occupies the site of the old Madison Square Garden. Time was when a corner- stone was the.first object to rise struc- turally above the 'foundation. In these mad days of girders and cranes, a building is already halfway to heaven before the cornerstone-layer prepares his solemn speech. Equally anticlimactic is the business of opening cornerstones when modern buildings are wrecked.. In the dizzy flight of time, twenty years is the span allotted to. our twentieth century structures, and when the cornerstone is opened and a copy of the New York Times is removed with proper rites, everybody remembers the headlines. R APIDLY growing up in our bor- derlands is a sect of people more hideous than circus freaks, more de- praved than axe-slayers. They are the Sunday hikers. ,They emerge scream- ing from the desolate places of the Bronx, they come heavily from the backyards of the world-fat girls in A / ..! /1// ;.c.,v IIJ\\' f; rm . 1/ 1 )\\ \\ 0 0 . . " .. 0 . "'''' ,,.. TOVN breeches and shirts, flat-footed young men with loud sweaters on their backs, loud wisecracks on their lips, and can- teens at their sides. They set their heel on the hills. They tramp on life. City creatures by heritage, when they desert their brick alleys for the green earth they leave behind them, like grubs, a sticky trail. What is more, they point their thumbs and ask for a ride, which gives us a pretty fair opportunity to mow them down like wheat. " T HE Pantheon de la Guerre," says a publicity blurb, "is being shown to thousands of enthusiastic Americans, as a messenger of f riend- ship and a harbinger of Peace." Rats! I t is being shown, to whoever buys a ticket and walks in, as a work of art, which it is. If one thing makes us madder than anything else it is the no- tion that war memorials, battleship maneuvers, war paintings, citizens' military training camps, and a lot of other things, are "harbingers of peace." Harbingers of bunk. Gift A N unaccountable weakness for "inside stories" leads us to set down information just gained from a source undoubtedly authentic regard- ing the recall of one of our former